Corporate Ladder

Opening screen
Chatbot assistance options
Completing tasks
Role promotion
Task completion

Inspiration

We were inspired by games that we've played online, specifically BLOOD MONEY! and We Become What We Behold. These games offer a simple user interface, but ultimately aim to reveal a significant moral or ethical issue. We decided to apply these ideas to a topic of our own, the ethical and personal issues that can come about due to AI usage, and create a game where we felt the greatest impacts of this issue would be felt.

What it does

The game itself is built into a site, and is playable through a simple and clean yet effective user interface. As the user, you play the role of an employee at an unnamed corporation and complete tasks to earn promotions. Along the way, you have the choice of using Sparky.AI, the company's AI chatbot, to aid in your tasks. However, each decision you make ultimately has both benefits and consequences, changing where you might end up.

How we built it

We started by creating a Figma to illustrate how our final product would look visually, with multiple screens showing different tasks or scenarios. Additionally, we created a flowchart to manage when and what screen events would take place since many events were linked to previous events. Lastly, we worked on VSCode and utilized GitHub as our collaboration platform to code in React, JavaScript, and CSS to bring our visualization and plans to reality. We split up the assignments in the beginning after brainstorming ideas for the project, so there was no time wasted.

Challenges we ran into

The plan became a bit more complicated than we had time to implement, so we had some trouble trying to simplify it. We also struggled to visualize how certain tasks and scenarios would be executed, so there was some time spent on that. We also had some minor technical issues near the end, as well as styling issues that needed some time to fix. We also faced challenges regarding the logic for which path the user will go down, based on how much AI they used to help them in their tasks. Ultimately, we diagrammed and communicated with each other to voice our opinions on these challenges to successfully tackle them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our idea and the planning that went into having a good storyline, since that made the game interesting. We are also proud of our website’s visuals and its cohesiveness. We are proud of having a fully functioning project by the end of the hackathon, and that all of our efforts blended together perfectly. The message of our project is very relevant to moral and social dilemmas regarding the usage of AI in modern day. It provides a different interactive perspective, which was one of our biggest goals for the project.

What we learned

We learned about how to split tasks evenly so that we can complete everything on time. We also learned how to combine all of our ideas into a cohesive idea so that each of us had a part in the storyline. Effective communication helped us figure out each other’s strengths and weaknesses and we assigned each person a role accordingly.

What's next for Corporate Ladder

Planning out the elements of Corporate Ladder, we initially had a very intricate plan involving many different tasks, decisions, and even more potential paths and story endings. As we move past the initial 24 hours of SparkHacks 2026, completing this project to reflect the vision we set out with is a goal we aim to achieve. Moving forward, we hope anyone who plays our game is able to connect with the themes we covered and the moral and ethical dilemmas we aimed to tackle.